NAE IONESCU AND THE ROMANIAN PHILOSOPHY SCHOOL GABRIELA POHOAłĂ, PH.D, SENIOR LECTURER, „DIMITRIE CANTEMIR” CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY [email protected] Abstract : This paper is meant to highlight the remarkable contribution of Nae Ionescu to the Romanian school of philosophy. He is considered to be an educational model, creator of a philosophy school as Nechifor Crainic was for the school of theology. He did not create a philosophical system, but he had exquisite disciples, axiological landmarks for Romanian contemporary and universal philosophy. He was the teacher of many well known personalities, among which Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Mircea Vulcanescu etc. No person reaches completeness and perfection without a model, without a spiritual mentor. For us, Nae Ionescu remains a prototype of the philosophy teacher. Keywords : spiritual mentor, philosophical education, disciple, metaphysics, history, God. I would have liked to have him as a teacher. I always thought that for glimpsing into the secrets of philosophy you need a real mentor, capable of lifting up, through the depth of his thought, through his living capacity, personal calling and method to the height of his philosophical discourse. Nae Ionescu used to say: ,,philosophical creation hangs on the inspiration that descends on us from above”. (Course on Metaphysics, p.17) In the following article, we attempt to analyze Nae Ionescu’s contribution to the philosophical education, considering that a teacher proves his own value having valuable disciples. Socrates had Plato, Plato had Aristotle, Aristotle had Alexander the Great, the Macedon, etc. Nae Ionescu (1890-1940) was the most influent philosophy teacher in the period between the two world wars. He got his PhD from the University of Munich, entitled Die Logistik als Versuch einer neuen Begrungung der Matthematik . Starting 1920, he taught logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion (course considered to be on the phenomenology of the religious act) at the University of Bucharest. He was also the editor in chief (1926-1929) and manager (1929-1934 and 1938) of the newspaper “Cuvantul”, in which he published more than one thousand articles on religious, political and economic issues. The academic publications of Nae Ionescu were only a few – some papers on logic, some forewords and a series of articles in the theological magazine “Predania” (1937). Nevertheless, his influence was enormous between 1922 and 1940. His lectures and papers revived the interest for metaphysics and philosophy of religion in Romania. Although he was chiefly a logician, he tried to understand all forms of human activities. He maintained that the philosopher needs to ponder not only upon the theoretical expression of historical life – from religion to logic to sciences – but upon meaningful creations: the crafts, the arts, the biographies, political events, and all others. Approaching the history of logic, as well as that of metaphysics or religion, he researched thoroughly the human spirit. For him, such a typology is always a creation of history and eventually of life. From this inception point, a radical historical scale of spiritual creations seems to develop. But, for Nae Ionescu, God* is nevertheless present in history through embodiment. Even though Nae Ionescu did not conceive a philosophical system or a body of work similar to that of Blaga or Constantin Radulescu Motru, he has build enormously by what he has transferred to his disciples. His courses were real shows. His charm was fascinating, like he was living the ecstasy of the speech; his most seducing force – his oral speeches, turned in 50 years after his death, into the main handicap in reconstructing his ideas. All his courses raised serious problems to his editors; as a proof of this statement, The History of Logic (1941) was thoroughly verified by four “lectors”, all of them very familiar with the peculiar style of their magisterial model: Virgil Bogdan, Constantin Floru, Constantin Noica and Mircea Vulc ǎnescu; vol.I of Metaphysics ( 1942) benefited from the editorial work of C.Floru, C.Noica, M.Vulcănescu, Octav Onicescu, Ştefan Teodorescu and Alice Botez; vol. II of Metaphysics (1944) was, in turn, checked by C.Floru, C.Noica, M.Vulc ǎnescu, Octav Onicescu and Cella Dona. Only “Roza Vânturilor”, edited before, in 1937, by Mircea Eliade, is a fortunate exception, because benefits from two advantages: the presence of Nae Ionescu and that of the publisher who worked on the texts published by Nae Ionescu himself, not on notes taken in shorthand. Despite all difficulties in transcribing and editing the notes by the ones who were his disciples, in respect to the clarity of the original text, we, the ones that were connected to Nae Ionescu only through the written texts, can understand and perceive that his relationship with philosophy takes place within a superior, metaphysical level. In his opinion, metaphysics’ scope is transcendence, divinity (Nae Ionescu, “Treaty on Metaphysics”). In philosophy, we consider essential the relationship of the thinker with the absolute, with divinity. This is what defines his identity, the essence of his world and life concepts. After all, this is what philosophy is: “ the science about world and life ” (Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, p.16). In this vein, Hegel supports the idea that “ the philosopher claims to have reached within the realm of truth, close to God, and reads the commandments straight in the original draft ”. Maybe this is why Nae Ionescu’s discourse is uncontestable. He was a teaching genius, and in the same time, a remarkable personality of his time. It is a gesture of kindred Romanian spirituality to unfold Nae Ionescu to our young generations: the way he thought, the way he taught, the way he lived the reality of his times, without distortions, wrath, prejudice or misconceptions, most of the times fruit of ignorance or unfavorable circumstances. We will try to bring arguments in favor of our first statement: where was the fascination of the audience for the logics or metaphysics’ lessons coming from?! Part of it comes from the distance preserved from the existing “textbooks” and from the stance of the teacher as a creator of the domain: “ on the issues that are not litigable, I won’t insist ”; “ I think that I’m not holding this class only for you, but for me too ”; “ I think that I’m not mistaking when I’m guessing that I succeeded in rooting, with your help, some of the fundamental issues in understanding this problematic of logic ”, etc. because it is an instrument of conveying knowledge, logics must be entertainingly presented. The professor succeeds in doing it solely through some formulations, such as: “ I can’t say more than that; maybe in three, four years, when things would eventually settle in my head, I would be able to find a better wording ”; “ I have to start by confessing that I am dissatisfied with my yesterday’s lecture […], the impression of unclearness, of incompleteness still persists within me ”; “you don’t have to believe everything I am telling you ”, etc. above all these rhetorical tools of self-expression, the professor – orator knows how to catch the benevolence and good humor of his audience, through the tricks of interlocution: “I promise you that…”; “it is more than you think”; “if you think about it”; “if you want to do this… you have to watch out”; “this is very important for you to remember ”, etc. To complete the stylistic register of this course on logic, here are some more samples of his crafted speech: “ some say that we have among us a so called mystic, whose name is Nae Ionescu… the thing is that they are stupid”; “ you have to add a little correction to your textbooks ”; “ with this last issue, I think that we solved all fundamental problems of logic; what is left untold … is just some filler; I gave you the logical frame; what you are going to do with it, that’s your problem”. Since we are discussing oral courses, there are footnotes only on three pages of the text edited following the stenographs of some members of his audience, and they belong to his first publisher, D.C.Amz ǎr. The index of proper names disseminated throughout the logic lessons of Nae Ionescu includes, in the order of occurrence, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, Plato, Anaxagoras, Pascal, Leibniz, Plotin, Espinoza, Newton, Bergson, Copernicus, Burkhart, Schopenhauer, Lobacevcki, Riemann, Poincare, Russell, Einstein, Maiorescu, Heraclites, Euclid, Lullus, Ptolemy, Anselm, Cristofor Columb, J.S. Mill, Galilei, Lavoisier, Hegel, Bequerel, W.Wundt, Erdmann, Brunschvicg, Sigwart, Cuvier,Fichte, Spengler, G.e. Sthal. Only one single Romanian logician is mentioned in the logic course of one of the most influential professors of logic and, relatively, few logicians that are also educators! Starting 1922, most of the students in Bucharest lived under the spiritual spell of Professor Nae Ionescu. This influence, exerted now even beyond the walls of the Faculty of Letters, spread throughout the departments of Theology and Sciences, and later on through A.S.C.R and the papers published in the newspaper “Cuvantul” and, of course, through his course on logic. We are not addressing here the fame he reached or the oppositions he faced within the public opinion of modern Romania. We are emphasizing and highlighting in the economy of these pages only the man, the professor who led for 15 years from behind the teaching pulpit the spiritual orientation of modern Romania. In the academic life, Professor Nae Ionescu is situated from the beginning as a direct follower of Nicolae Iorga and admits of being one of his purest “pupils”, raised in the spirit of historic realism, a current and Romanian phenomenon brought into a dynamic mood by Nicolae Iorga. Chronologically, Nae Ionescu appears to be an “inheritor” of Vasile Parvan, because ever since 1926 he faced a crowd of students who grew up under the spell of Parvan, left behind with no spiritual guidance nor hope.